January 24, 2005

Assault On My Freaking Brain

By | January 24, 2005

Seeing a remake for John Carpenter’s 1976 classic, Assault on Precinct 13, brings mixed emotions. A remake is a double-edged sword: the bigger budget and star power offer a chance to bring the original’s story to a larger audience while the Hollywoodizing of this story will surely dilute its original flair. Furthermore, giving the project to a rookie director who, in my humble opinion never saw the original, is suicide. In the end, the polish and prestige without the panache takes the beautiful original and turns it into a modern high-class whore.

Initially, Assault works. Opening with John Roenick (Hawke) and his team doing a drug bust, we are shot-gunned into this sucker. We jump eight months ahead to New Year’s Eve. Lawrence Fishburne, is shipped off after being caught in the act. Hours later, Roenick is joined by a sexy female cop and an old captain. But wouldn’t you guess it, four criminals are dropped off at Hawke’s hut, including Fishburne, John Leguizamo and Ja Rule. Whoever did casting is a genius.

Suddenly, assassins bust in and try to take out Fishburne, but Roenick is all over it. After fending off his fort and taking down an assassin or two, he discovers that they are dirty cops, led by Gabriel Byrne worked with Fishburne, who now might testify against them. And once Roenick finds out about it, everybody inside has to be killed to keep the secret safe. Granted, a lot of this stuff is exciting and, though derivative, keeps you in your seat. Tragically, we find this twist out thirty minutes into the film. The angst of being uninformed gives a film momentum. Sadly, Assault had no momentum because the last 70 percent of the film we are totally aware, no surprises. We need good action to stay satisfied and we never get it — think soft-core porn.

Cops arming criminals for assistance is an amazing idea with unlimited potential. Everything after that falls on its ass. The humor is one-dimensional and the characters are underdeveloped. The relationship between the good cops and prisoners is a bunch of failed Mexican standoffs. Would Byrne really have an entire slew of thirty dirty cops working for him? And if so, would they really have that much trouble taking out three cops, four criminals, and a psychiatrist? The entire process is like watching Steven Segal take out forty bad guys, one at a time.

So many things are left unanswered. Roenick’s sentiment in the end for Fishburne is a combination of Cage letting Connery go in The Rock with the obsessive revenge of To Live and Die in L.A. Hollywood is turning into a garage sale of cult antiques. As long as they just don’t touch The Godfather and The French Connection, they can whore themselves all they want.

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ByJanuary 25, 2005

As the communications industry gets more homogenized and the same syndicated sitcoms run rampant across every basic cable channel, viewers are understandably besought by anxiety. Are we all just mechanical observers, faceless hordes without any discernible interests or attention spans? A spate of more specific channels has tried to redress this problem in recent years: The History Channel for nebbish pseudo-intellectuals; the vintage DisneyToons channel for 25-year-olds still going on about 1989’s Tail Spin Christmas spectacular; The Agriculture Channel for farmers and livestock. But audiences barely know their own traits, let alone what channels would appeal to them. It’s too much to ask all viewers to go through each facet of their personality. No one wants to pontificate on how ironic or introverted they are before they can watch TV. All we ask for is flashing lights, celebrities, and something, anything, to get our attention away from that goddamn divorce that crippled my life two years ago. Three channels have come to the rescue to simplify this procedure. On one side, the Oxygen Network. On the other, Spike TV and the Outdoor Life Network (OLN). It’s no longer a matter of considering one’s own interests. Have a seat. Grab your crotch and figure out your gender. Shut up and watch. This vastly superior method eliminates all the guesswork. All I need to know is that I’m male and not blind, and the TV will take care of the rest. So I made it my duty to watch Spike TV and OLN for an entire week in an effort to determine what sort of things I enjoy. Apparently, I am quite fond of rivers, soft porn and detergent commercials. Familiar to all male college students, Spike offers essentially two types of shows on any given day: reruns of Blind Date and MXC, a dubbed Japanese game show in which contestants literally blast their brains down their throats by falling face-first on large rocks. In the case of the former, balding, unemployed geezers try vainly to solicit blow jobs through incomprehensible speech impediments. For the latter, let’s just note that it’s both the end of civilization and the funniest show ever. When taken as a whole then, the message to young males seems to be something like, “Hey, we’re all just going to turn into lonely, dull, impotent struggling actors anyway, so we might as well just start literally cracking our skulls on stepping stones.” Which is actually a very good point and one that young men often forget. In fact, one could argue convincingly that Spike TV is a worthy successor to C

ByJanuary 25, 2005

Deckhead:
Looking Closer at Mike Nichols' Edgy Masterpiece

Body:
Closer’s ensemble cast of Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, Jude Law and Julia Roberts displays extraordinary versatility in acting. Nevertheless, behind those dynamic, raw performances is a brutally honest and intelligent script, written by Patrick Marber, who also wrote the play of the same name. Marber uses a deep understanding of people to write one of the best screenplays of the year. Some have found parts of the film vulgar and inappropriate. While there are no sex scenes, the dialogue is often jarring. I saw people walk out of the movie theater. The film is not merely about miserable people making other people miserable. Rather, the film precisely illustrates the vulnerability that people experience in relationships because of their shifting dynamics. The story is sincere and profound, and the characters are captivating and believable. Marber intimately focuses on four individuals, Dan (Law), Alice (Portman), Larry (Owen) and Anna (Roberts), all of whom have severe difficulties connecting with, and getting closer to, one another. We are led to believe that Alice is the only pure character of the four, but this assumption is challenged at the end of the film, when it is revealed that Alice’s name is really Jane, and that she had been living a fantasy during her time in England. There is clear foreshadowing of this event; earlier in the film, Alice tells Larry that “everybody loves a big fat lie,” and later, that “lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off.” Jane picks the name Alice from one of the plaques on the wall of a London memorial garden; the plaque, which is shown at the end, says that a woman named Alice Ayers died saving three children. In the play, the character of Alice (i.e. Jane) also dies at the end, but not in the film. Nevertheless, the illusion she had created does die. One could argue that she ironically saved the other three characters in the film, not in any sort of conventional way, but in a way in which she made them more awake and curious. Dan, who writes obituaries, Larry, who would rather chat on the Internet than in person, and Anna, who uses her camera to see the world, are all isolated before Alice arrives. At least for a short while, Alice saves them from their misery. By showing them the intricacies of love and relationships, she saves them from themselves. Alice initially inspires Dan, in particular. Marber portrays Dan’s character as if he is a child. At one point, Anna sarcastically asks him if he’s twelve. Perhaps more significantly, Dan is still mourning over the death of his mother, and is searching for a nurturing figure. After all, he seems to fall in love with Alice when she cleans his glasses at the hospital, and with Anna when she fixes his tie during a photo shoot. Alice’s relationship with Dan is based on an illusion, and at the end of the film, Dan threatens this by his insistence on the truth about whether or not Alice and Larry slept together. Whether they actually did is brilliantly left up to interpretation, but Dan cannot learn to trust Alice, and in the final hotel room scene, Alice ironically tests him by saying, “This is the moment of your life.” Indeed it was, and seconds later, he ruined it. “I would have loved you forever,” Alice then tragically tells him, “but now it’s too late.” Alice returns to New York, and we see her walking confidently down the street in the final shot, with heads turning and staring at her. They can’t take their eyes off of her. This time, however, she does not make the mistake of returning their gazes, as she did with Dan in the film’s opening scene. This final shot also illustrates that lust is not the same thing as love, something that Anna, Larry and Dan were never able to understand. Closer is an absorbing dialogue-driven film. The metaphors are smart, such as smoking reflecting the characters’ inability to overcome their struggles with loneliness, and they seem to constantly create conflict for themselves. They are unfaithful to one another, but they are almost always truthful. Sadly, even the truth isn’t enough for them to get closer. It is an art film that tells a timeless story of how relationships can shift from uplifting to tragic in a moment’s notice. The film is not for everyone, but it can be, if you look close enough. Archived article by Avash KalraSun Staff Writer